IN INDIA’S ELECTION, WHATSAPP PLAYS CENTRAL ROLE
The Facebook-owned messaging service has become an important vehicle for political parties and religious activists to reach out to voters
Waving a giant saffron flag, Pranav Bhat last week joined a political rally for Prime Minister Narendra Modi and India’s ruling party here in this sweltering port city on the southwest coast. Milling on a vast field with his college buddies, Mr Bhat, 18, cheered for Mr Modi and his Hindu-oriented Bharatiya Janata Party, which was trying to wrest control of Karnataka state from the more secular Indian National Congress in legislative elections.
Yet the most intense political campaigning was not taking place on the streets. Instead, the action was happening on WhatsApp, a messaging service owned by Facebook that has about 250 million users in India.
Mr Bhat, a BJP youth leader, said he used WhatsApp to stay in constant touch with the 60 voters he was assigned to track for the party. He sent them critiques of the state government, dark warnings about Hindus being murdered by Muslims — including a debunked BJP claim that 23 activists were killed by jihadis — and jokes ridiculing Congress leaders. His own WhatsApp stream was full of election updates, pro-BJP videos, and false news stories, including a fake poll purportedly commissioned by the BBC that predicted a sweeping BJP win.
“Every minute, I’m getting a message,” said Mr Bhat, a college student.
Facebook’s WhatsApp is taking an increasingly central role in elections, especially in developing countries. More than any other social media or messaging app, WhatsApp was used in recent months by India’s political parties, religious activists and others to send messages and distribute news to Karnataka’s 49 million voters. While many messages were ordinary campaign missives, some were intended to inflame sectarian tensions and others were downright false, with no way to trace where they originated.
In the run-up to the vote on Wednesday in the state — Mr Modi’s Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) won most seats in Karnataka but fell short of a clear majority — the BJP and Congress parties claimed to have set up at least 50,000 WhatsApp groups between them to spread their messages. At the same time, many others — their identities are unknown — distributed videos, audio clips, posts and false articles designed specifically to rile up the area’s Hindu-Muslim fissures.
Right-wing Hindu groups employed WhatsApp to spread a grisly video that was described as an attack on a Hindu woman by a Muslim mob but was in fact a lynching in Guatemala. One audio recording on the service from an unknown sender urged all Muslims in the state to vote for the Congress party “for the safety of our women and children.” Another WhatsApp message exhorted Hindus to vote for the BJP because “this is a war of faiths.”
Like the rest of India, Karnataka is a Hindu majority state. A staple of electoral politics here is pitting Muslims against Hindus, and various Hindu castes against each other.
Ankit Lal, a top strategist for the Aam Aadmi Party, which fielded 28 candidates for Karnataka’s 224 legislative seats, said WhatsApp has become the most important tool in digital campaigning. “We wrestle on Twitter. The battle is on Facebook. The war is on WhatsApp,” he said.
The role that WhatsApp plays in influencing voters has received far less attention than that of its sister services, Facebook and its photosharing platform, Instagram. Both Facebook and Instagram have come under intense scrutiny in recent months for how Russian agents used them to manipulate US voters in the 2016 presidential election.
WhatsApp has largely escaped that notice because it is used more heavily outside the United States, with people in countries like India, Brazil and Indonesia sending a total of 60 billion messages a day. And unlike Facebook and Instagram, where much of the activity is publicly visible online, WhatsApp’s messages are generally hidden because it began as a person-to-person communication tool.
Yet WhatsApp has several features that make it a potential tinderbox for misinformation and misuse. Users can remain anonymous, identified only by a phone number. Groups, which are capped at 256 members, are easy to set up by adding phone numbers of contacts. People tend to belong to multiple groups, so they often get exposed to the same messages repeatedly. When messages are forwarded, there is no hint of where they originated. And everything is encrypted, making it impossible for law enforcement officials or even WhatsApp to view what’s being said without looking at the phone’s screen.
Govindraj Ethiraj, founder of Boom and IndiaSpend, two sites that fact-check Indian political claims, called WhatsApp “insidious” for its role in spreading false information.
“You’re dealing with ghosts,” he said. Boom worked with Facebook during the Karnataka elections to flag fake news appearing on the social network.
Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook’s chief executive, has pledged to curb the abuse of Facebook and Instagram by people seeking to secretly influence elections. But he has said nothing about WhatsApp, which Facebook bought in 2014 for $19 billion.
WhatsApp officials said they are concerned about misuse of the platform, whose terms of service forbid hate speech, threats of violence and false statements. A few weeks ago, its systems detected an attempt by someone in Karnataka to create dozens of groups very quickly using automation. After some people reported getting spam from these groups, the company blocked them all. WhatsApp declined to say who it suspected was behind the group creation.
“We’re working to give people more control over groups and are constantly evolving our tools to block automated content,” WhatsApp said in a statement.